Is everything fine? Westmoreland Museum program delves into reality

Someone asks, “How are you?” and you automatically say, “Fine.”

But are you really?

Six Pittsburgh-area women artists will get to the root of the question during “Everything Is Fine,” an outdoor performance art event set for 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday at The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg.

Led by the museum’s current artist in residence, Christiane Dolores, the program will invite each performer to give an authentic answer to the question while demonstrating one of their own simple pleasures.

Each artist will have a station among the museum’s gardens.

“They’ve been given a scroll to write a real answer, what they really want to say,” Dolores said. “They will be separate vignettes collected as one piece.”

Saying everything is fine when it’s not is “so American — it’s a very pain-averse culture,” Dolores said. “It’s something typically said by a woman, as a response to gender gas-lighting, or by people of color.”

It’s an ethos rooted in the belief that a “work harder” attitude or the willingness to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is all that’s needed to overcome problems, ignoring issues of systemic inequality, she said.

An example of an authentic answer to the question is, “My partner took the rent money and paid his credit card bill, and now we’re being evicted,” Dolores said.

“Everything Is Fine” will be presented in conjunction with Sunday’s opening of the exhibition “Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee,” a painter known for her Depression-era murals and depictions of everyday life in the mid-20th century.

As a nod to Lee, the performance artists will be clad in aprons.

The program also is “a response to how the pandemic continues to play out,” Dolores said. “We’re trying to go back to normal, but normal is not working. It’s very confusing, what to do and what not to do. But what is not confusing is that we should protect others.”

Participating artists

According to her website, Dolores — who also goes by the moniker Madame Dolores — is “a multi-platform cross-disciplinary artist, who employs sound, vision, text and performance as storytelling tools to create radical, sometimes controversial, cultural engagements.” She is a founding member of #notwhitecollective, a group of 13 diverse women artists who “seek liberation through sharing space and stories; research and art-making; discussing the history of imperialism and its effect on us, on the whole non-white world.”

Other artists participating in “Everything Is Fine” include:

• Veronica Corpuz, a first-generation Filipina American poet and multimedia artist and the former director of the Three Rivers Arts Festival. A former adjunct professor at Chatham University, she is working on a memoir of prose poems about her late husband, Michael Grzymkowski, and his battle with brain cancer.

• Rachel Klipa, an arts administrator, curator and writer whose most recent curatorial project is “Among Women: Contemporary Art from Serbia,” currently at 937 Gallery in downtown Pittsburgh.

• Amanda Van Story Lewis, an opera singer and producer whose projects and performances focus on works and stories of marginalized voices and identities. She also is a member of Demaskus Theater Collective.

• Renee Piechocki, an artist, public art consultant and founding director of the Office of Public Art, a partnership of the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council and the Department of City Planning.

• Tracey D. Turner, an actor with stage, screen and television credits who was named 1997 Actress of the Year by In Pittsburgh Newsweekly for her portrayal of Prospero in the timespace production of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”

Advance registration is not required to attend “Everything Is Fine.” The museum recommends advance online registration to visit the Doris Lee exhibition. Museum hours on Sunday are 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Details: thewestmoreland.org